Laundry Days
by VickyVicarious
Summary: A prologue of sorts to the musical, ending with scenes from the first song. Mostly an introspective look at Billy.


Billy had always been the sort of guy who was just too smart for his own good. Not in a rebelling-against-authority type of way; just that if he had only been a little bit less intelligent, he might have had a much happier life.

It was because of his intelligence that he was bullied back in grade school by kids more liked than he: popular, good-looking, strong, and always in the right no matter how he might suffer. And it was his intelligence that made him so freaked out around girls. Had he been less clever (unable to almost instantly calculate the depressingly low odds of any of them being willing to go out with him, for instance), he might have been more comfortable.

Billy had always been trapped in the position of having the upper hand mentally, of having all that untapped potential of power, and never the opportunity to use it, which was why he went evil.

He was very political, very radical, and he thought that what the world needed was a reboot, with his rules as the new pillars of life. Those rules were good ones, not even vengeful; they had begun in third grade, when he decided that if he ruled the world, there would be no swirlies, and continued on with the public interest (pretty much) in mind since then.

And the only way Billy could see this actually working out (also 54.32% more likely to happen than the other possibilities) was if he became a Villain and took over the world.

He first got into Villainy in college, and it was there that his natural promise finally shone through and got him a spot in life. Sure, he might not be able to get a date or beat up football players, but with just the right combination of elements in a carefully controlled area, he could disable them all ten seconds flat.

Billy was finally a star at something, and he rose through the Mad Scientist ranks with ease, until finally he was ready to begin his first assault on the public. Everything was carefully calculated towards his advancing through the ranks of Evil, until some time in the future he could be a member of the ELE, and then take over the world and begin his reconstructions.

On that day, he met Penny.

He was doing his laundry, feeling like he was floating and not at all like he was folding jeans and separating whites from darks. Because somewhere across town, his automated drone was slowly and quietly boring into the bank's safe room, where it would catch on camera the codes used to get inside. Its stealth settings should make it unnoticeable.

She walked past him in a breeze of violets, and began to unload delicates into an empty machine.

It was a moderately mind-boggling experience for Billy, not in the least because he was already feeling anxious and off-balance, which was why he'd decided to distract himself with this incredibly boring chore. Another large contributing factor was that while she was immensely beautiful and he _couldn't_ really stop staring, she was currently engaged in sorting out underwear and bras, which made him feel like a pervert for it.

He did his laundry in mind-boggled silence, his heart beating faster every time she looked in his direction. And at the same time, halfway across town, his drone lost power halfway through the bank wall, the first of many failed inventions. When he found out later Billy would be in a fury, stomping around his lab and finally exiting it altogether before, in his anger and disappointment, he accidentally blew something up. But had he learned of the drone now, he wouldn't have cared, because Penny had asked him if she could borrow a quarter for her last load, and he'd nodded (he didn't think he'd be able to talk if he tried), and gotten his hand stuck in his pocket. It took him three minutes to retrieve the coin for her, and then he'd fled the building, pulse leaping and face flushing.

The second time Billy met Penny, he didn't try to talk to her, because he'd attempted to convince himself that it didn't matter that he'd never get a date with her; she was probably just like all the other girls anyway, and Billy did not like the complacent masses.

Then on the way into the Laundromat, he spied her coming out, carrying two bags of clean clothing; a small one, unmarked, and a much bigger one, with 'charity' written on the side.

He knew instantly that he was doomed, and her red hair curled against her shoulders.

Billy didn't see Penny again for almost a week, and in that time two more inventions failed and he received his online PhD in Horribleness, with lesser degrees in Rays and Plotting. He started a blog – the Horrible Blog – in honor of this, mostly as a joke and because Moist had gotten him a webcam as a congratulations present, but found that he really enjoyed it. It was like a diary, but not, and he got a shivery feeling from the idea that people would be out there watching him, looking forward to each update on his life.

Of course, that didn't turn out to be true, so much. He got some viewers, but not too many, and the most important event of the month was Moist also officially becoming his henchman.

Life went on in this way for quite some time, with a few people watching his blog, Moist coming around and the two of them hanging out, many hours spent in the lab, and occasional breaks for food or sleep or shopping or laundry (during which he memorized what days and times Penny would be there and started going at the same time), and not too much else. Johnny Snow, a rather ridiculous wannabe hero, took notice of him and began to declare that they were arch-nemeses; Billy was offended and refuted this, even though having a parka-wearing hero-wannabe as a nemesis was probably better than having none. He knew he could do better, though, and you can't just switch around nemeses. You have to pick one and stick with it, so he just waited for a better one to come along, as heroes did.

And, oh, did he.

Captain Hammer was everything Billy despised; and the requisite hate for a nemesis, which Billy had half-expected to have to fake, was certainly there. Billy was almost positive that Hammer was actually someone he'd known all his life, one of the kids that had shoved him into the water fountain, tripped him, given him wedgies, and so on. It would be _most_ ironic, Billy thought, if he was the kid that had given Billy that fateful swirlie in third grade, which had led to his Rules for a Better World, which led to his Villainy. The thing that would make it even more fittingly ironic was if he, Dr. Horrible, was the one that brought the Hammer down.

Captain Hammer, corporate tool, as Billy privately liked to call him; he most likely _did_ have a cushy job climbing some corporate ladder, charming or intimidating people into giving him what he wanted without working for it – if he even had a job at all, and didn't just lounge around enjoying the royalties from all of the Captain Hammer bedsheets, action figures, t-shirts, novelty mugs, autographed posters, and other merchandise… something Billy wouldn't put past him.

And yes, to be fair, Billy didn't have a _job_ either, per say – not unless you counted designing a computer program to work multiple online jobs in his name – but he at least spent all day working on his latest invention. His mind, heart, and soul went into what he did. All Hammer did was show up and punch stuff.

Usually him.

Billy's first order of business after he finally met Hammer firsthand (first impression: sailing headfirst off a building – okay, into a river, but still – heroes weren't supposed to try to freaking kill you!) was to make a decent healing ray, or goo, or _something_ that lessened the aches and bruises. Or maybe just a force field.

Unfortunately, the force field failed, very painfully for Billy, and he ended up collapsing halfway up his stairs, blacking out from pain and exhaustion. When he woke up, his elderly neighbor Marge was leaning over him, frantically asking if he was all right. The grandmotherly woman had always liked Billy; he was sweet (if a little odd; he had a thing about not letting anyone else into his apartment) and would frequently pick up her mail so she didn't have to walk down three flights of stairs on aching legs, or even sometimes go shopping or do her laundry for her.

Luckily, Billy wasn't wearing Dr. Horrible's lab coat at the time – one of his first completely successful inventions was a little device that, through a lot of complicated physics, could almost magically change his clothes from civilian into villain in an instant; he just had to duck behind something so no one saw the machine at work. It was also handy at disguising them, so that when he did his laundry in public, it didn't look like there was a suspicious amount of white lab coats; a very practical idea, if not very threatening or impressive to brag about.

Billy made up excuses about being mugged, and allowed Marge to help him to his door and supply him with generous amounts of fresh-baked cookies; and then he set them down on the floor and promptly fell asleep in his gigantic cushy Plotting Chair, where he'd gotten many of his greatest (failed or unachieved as-yet, but still great) ideas.

When Billy woke he ordered a Captain Hammer dartboard online, and started work on a Shrink Ray, eating cookies and writing formulas on the floor.

Life went on in this manner for a long time – the number of Billy's failed heists slowly decreased, and he was even lucky enough to receive a letter of condemnation from the deputy mayor, after accidentally blowing up his car (not that Billy let him know it was an accident).

And, okay, the Shrink Ray didn't fire so well, and he ended up getting wedgied in front of a photographer, but no real supervillian would let something insignificant like that stop him. He had to think like Bad Horse.

So Billy really started to try. He looked at old articles about Bad Horse's terribly Bad Deeds, and eventually, after reading all about Bad Horse's defeat of the Good Gorilla by using his tendency to swing in the trees against him, coating them in tar, he realized – Billy needed to look at Hammer's weaknesses, not just attack at random.

The wedgie was pretty good inspiration.

However, the problem was that in this world, no matter what Billy liked to think, meatheads really did work out better. They succeeded where geeks like him never did. In fights, for instance. Hammer's only weaknesses were his tendency to go for the simple punch (not really a weakness, as it had always worked out for him before), his lack of intelligence, and his lack of morals or heart. Of course, no one but Billy ever noticed those last few, too caught up in their fangirling, somehow still managing to think that the sun shone out of his every freaking orifice, even after they witnessed first-hand just how little he really cared for the people he saved.

Still, Billy thought about this, and eventually he landed on a solution. Maybe. There was no point in attempting to use the so-called hero's lack of morality against him, since he didn't have enough resources to generate some big pick-between-the-citizens'-lives-or-your-girlfriend's thing, and besides he wouldn't want to put anyone's life in danger. And Hammer would need a girlfriend, not just a one-night stand. And if Hammer's hypothetical girlfriend died, the press would lap up his suffering. And there was always the risk that Hammer would pull a Spiderman and rescue both against all probability.

Stupid Spiderman.

Anyway. The only real option was to go for Hammer's physical strength. He relied entirely on it – he wasn't a gadgets kinda guy like Batman, and he certainly didn't have any brains, so if Billy could just find a way to get his strength out of the way, he'd be able to overpower him.

The problem lay in actually doing that. Billy experimented with a Muscle-Melter for a while, but he had to drop that idea when it occurred to him that it would probably be fatal. That was the point – Billy didn't do fatal. He was part of the new generation of villains, and despite his few throwbacks to the old days (monologuing, evil laughter) he was a modern guy. His blogging was evidence enough of that, as well as his extremely high-tech inventions. The new generation of evil didn't kill.

He could figure out a way to do this casualty-free, surely. He'd minored in Plotting in college! And whatever had happened to his skills with rays? He shouldn't be running out of ideas for them already, this early in his career. Signature weapons were like arch-nemeses; it was just tacky to change one halfway in.

It came to Billy one day at the Laundromat when he was doing Marge's laundry for her as well as his own (in addition to liking the woman, it had occurred to him that Penny might wonder what he was doing washing woman's clothing, and then he could explain his act of charity and she would be impressed), next to Penny as he had always been.

He had slight, or maybe not so slight, stalker tendencies when it came to her, which was how he knew that she had broken up with her boyfriend two weeks ago and seemed the happier for it; it might have had something to do with the (Photoshopped, but she didn't know that) pictures of him in bed with another woman that she had received in the mail from an anonymous source.

Anyway, the point was that she was currently single, and they had been doing laundry next to each-other for almost three months now, and Billy thought, as he watched her sorting her laundry into the machine, vibrant red hair pulled back from her face with a barrette, _If only I could just freeze this moment to make it last longer – then I could maybe find the right words to tell her what I feel_.

She had an almost-smile on her face, and he tried to speak to her, for what must be the hundredth time, though all that came out was a tired mumble. Still, it was the effort that counted, right?

He glanced up at her as she closed the laundry machine; his own words ricocheted back into his brain: _If only I could freeze this moment_.

Freeze Ray. It was perfect.

He could just… freeze Captain Hammer (corporate tool) in place, and continue about his way, robbing the bank, or stealing files from the mayor, or – whatever he wanted, really, because the Hammer would just be _frozen_ there, unable to fight back.

Perfect. And all thanks to Penny.

Billy knew he loved her, and he was reasonably certain that one day he would build up the nerve to tell her so – but now was the first time he'd ever really been able to _see_ that, clearly in his future, a time when she might see him as a person, might love him back.

He turned to her, suddenly filled with confidence, and blurted, "Love your hair."

Penny looked up, completely startled, and his courage failed him. "What?"

But still, it was there, underneath his desperate, awkward back-tracking: "No, I, I, I love the, uh… air. Heh." Hope, lurking.

And she smiled, even if she probably thought he was a complete weirdo, and it was perfect. _Perfect_. Billy knew, deep inside his bones, that this idea, sparked from Penny like she was his muse, was exactly what he'd been looking for: one way or another, this Freeze Ray was going to change his life. He knew it.

Hammer was going down. And he didn't know how, but Billy was going to get his girl. He had to.

He practically skipped home, whistling, and dropped off the laundry at Marge's with a blinding grin, leaving her bewildered. Then it was up to his lab, where Billy instantly found himself lost in calculations and research, still grinning.

A Freeze Ray, of course, and the idea (perfect idea, and completely nonfatal; he'd known there was a way) came from Penny.

Thank God for laundry days.

* * *

_Laundry day  
See you there  
Underthings  
Tumbling_

_Wanna say_  
'_Love your hair.'  
Here I go:  
Mumbling_

_With my Freeze Ray  
I will stop the world_

_With my Freeze Ray  
I will find the time to  
Find the words to_

_Tell you how  
How you make  
Make me feel  
What's the phrase?_

_Like a fool  
Kind of sick  
Special needs  
Anyways_

_With my Freeze Ray  
I will stop the pain  
It's not a Death Ray or an Ice Beam  
That's all Johnny Snow_

_I just think you need time to know  
That I'm the guy to make it real  
The feelings you don't dare to feel  
I'll bend the world to our will  
And we'll make time stand still_

_That's the plan  
Rule the world  
You and me  
Any day_

_Love your hair  
("What?")_  
"_No, I, I, I love the, uh… air. Heh."__  
Anyway  
With my Freeze Ray _

_I will stop –_


End file.
